pinning it down to a 1588 edition of the Roman dramatist Terence’s play, Andria, which had been translated into English by Maurice Kyffin and printed by Thomas East, and in which hyphens, rather than dots, mark incomplete utterances by the play’s characters. … Although there are instances of ellipses occurring in letters around the same time, this is the earliest printed version found by Toner following her chronological research into the earliest dramas in print.

[Note: Above I use an ellipsis, the one before “Although,” to indicate missing or removed words rather than “incomplete speech.”]

Toner’s favourite uses from literature:

From Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne:

“Pray my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?—Good G..! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,—Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying?—Nothing.”

From The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot:

“ I grow old … I grow old …

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”

From The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

“… I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.”

From “Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson:

“’Hope’ is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all -”

Letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West:

“if I saw you would you kiss me? If I were in bed would you—”

Virginia Woolf imagines death by a bomb in her diary:

“Yes. Terrifying. I suppose so – Then a swoon; a drum; two or three gulps attempting consciousness – and then, dot dot dot.”

It’s much easier to be aggressive over text because you’re not face-to-face with the person you’re talking to, and people are finding new ways to express that aggression via the humble period. A new study by researchers at American University on text messages and IMs shows that the way we use punctuation has changed in order to convey new meaning through mediums that make it difficult to express tone, The New Republicreports.

Before texts, every sentence ended with a period. But with the advent of impersonal electronic communication, line breaks became a quicker and easier way to express the end of a thought. “The default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all,” Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania​, told The New Republic. “In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like, ‘This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.'” In other words, because the period is a deliberate choice, including it is especially passive-aggressive.